News

By Georges Buscemi, president of Quebec Life Coalition
Translated by Quebec Life Coalition staff.

On April 26, a column by Elsie Lefebvre (former Parti Québécois MP and Montreal city councillor) appeared on the Journal de Montréal website, discussing an announcement by Martine Biron, Minister responsible for the Status of Women, that she would soon be launching a "consultation" to ensure that the "right to abortion" becomes enshrined in Quebec law. The title of the article: Abortion rights threatened, even here in Quebec.

Lefebvre reviews the more or less well-founded reasons for believing that the "right" to abortion is threatened in Quebec and Canada: "Trumpist" Pierre Poilièvre and pro-life MPs "emanating from the conservative religious right", as well as "pro-life volunteers who are slowly but surely weaving their web" and other boogeyman who “give her goosebumps”, are, according to Lefebvre, working together to weaken access to abortion.

We won't dwell on the hysterical aspect of the analysis (Trump! Pro-lifers weave their web! etc.). What is most annoying is the underhanded manipulation of the reader's mind by claiming, through a headline such as "Abortion Rights Threatened," that the assertion that abortion is a "right" is so obvious that it does not even need to be defended. But the opposite is true: it is obvious that abortion is not a right, that such a "right" cannot exist, and that if there exists today in Western societies permission to abort, or tolerance of the crime of abortion, it is because we have no respect for the right to life of the unborn class of humans. Moreover, if the current state of affairs is now threatened, that is very good news, because not only is abortion not a right, it is a blatant example of a human rights violation. But to understand this, we must first know what a "right" is.

Definition of "human rights"

Human rights are, according to Wikipedia (I'm quoting a source that is certainly not to the advantage of pro-lifers), "a philosophical, legal, and political concept, according to which every human being possesses universal, inalienable rights, regardless of positive law (existing law) or other local factors such as ethnicity, nationality, or religion." Basically, certain things are due to the innocent human person, such as life, speech, the right to associate, and this, regardless of one’s origin, size, beliefs. These rights can only be taken away or limited for serious reasons, such as in the case of a murderer who must be incarcerated for the protection of other citizens. This concept of human rights is incompatible, again according to Wikipedia, "with the idea that building a better society justifies the elimination or oppression of those who are supposed to stand in the way of the realization of that better society."

And this is the simple reason why abortion is a violation of human rights: in order to build a better world for one class of people — women — pro-abortionists claim that it is legitimate to sacrifice the lives of members of another class of people, the unborn. This goes against the very concept of an innate human right, a right that is possessed by virtue of man's humanity and has not been conferred upon him by a state or other human power. We do not have the right to kill the unborn, period, even if that killing might —in the view of the perpetrator, of course, and not the victim — seem to make our society "progress".

Now, here a pro-abortionist might try to take refuge in the nonsensical argument that the embryo is not "human" or "a person". I say "nonsensical" because there are only a few months and a little water and food between the embryo and the newborn baby it will become. Do we dare to claim that adding a little water to an embryo would have changed its nature, transformed it from the simple animal that it was, into a human being? Or worse: would an unborn child become human only after it has completely left the womb, as our delusional Canadian Criminal Code claims, as if the birth canal were endowed with magical powers that could transform a "cluster of cells" into a baby with human rights? The unborn child is therefore obviously a human being, from the moment of conception, regardless of the pro-abortionists who look for a pretext to eliminate it when it is advantageous to them.

Finally, and this is the sad reality, I believe that many pro-abortionists, if they claim to promote "human rights", do not really believe in them. Many of them have a purely material view of existence: all humans, not just babies, are just "clumps of cells" or piles of matter. Rights have no hold on heaps of matter, but only on human beings, endowed with immortal souls created directly by God. Basically, without a conception of the divine and the spiritual, everything becomes matter to be owned or thrown away, and human rights evaporate. All that remains is the will of the strongest at the expense of the weakest, which we see today manifested in many ways. It is up to us, believers in a God who created us and conferred rights and duties on us, to preserve this idea of human rights, even if many of our fellow citizens betray this ideal while praising it.